Social Media

Google Apps: Now With Video Sharing

Google Apps, the simple online office package aimed primarily at small businesses, now has support for videos. Users can post and embed videos, tag them, and leave comments - just like having your own mini YouTube. According to CNET, the technology used was actually developed by YouTube for corporate clients, and although it's quite similar to what you get on YouTube, some features stand out. Scene Browser, for example, lets you browse through the video using thumbnails which refer to certain keyframes.

It might seem like a small upgrade, but it's actually quite significant; hosting videos costs money and resources, and many companies will be relieved to have a simple solution such as this within Google Apps. Granted, the storage offered within Google Apps Premier Edition (which costs $50 yearly) is 3 GB per user, which is not that much when it comes to video. The videos themselves, however, are without standard YouTube restrictions: up to 300 MB in size and without a time limit.

Google Video is an interesting test for Google. Depending on its success, we can probably expect additional features like more storage, live video streaming and video conferencing, which will make it much more interesting to enterprise customers. Perhaps Google has an idea how to make money out of video sharing after all?

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